To live in agreement with nature is to apply reason. (Not to hug a tree!) And to improve the human cosmopolis
You are having a conversation. In a meeting. In your immediate or extended family. With your life partner. With a service provider on your phone. Any of these can become difficult at any moment. You may struggle to form your thoughts and express your needs. Perhaps at this very moment, you need them to be concise, but they aren’t. The conversation escalates, becomes emotionally charged. You feel awful or agitated or righteously filled with indignation. You call your best friend. You tell the story. And yes, you get the confirmation you were rightfully upset.
Time passes. You feel less agitated or aroused. Your body, chest or shoulders start feeling less tight. The conversation might be on replay in your mind. You start thinking: I should have said this. I could have said that. Why did I not think of this during the conversation? Darn it. This would have been a much better response. Or you may regret the escalation and how you reacted, what you said.
What happened has been described often this way. You had a flight-or-fight response. You have been triggered. You might get advice like: You should not have said this. You should have talked face to face. This only adds to your rumination, the replay of the conversation in your mind.
Everything you need to know to empower you to react more beneficially is within you already. The knowledge and wisdom were just inaccessible because of the emotions you have created in the conversation.
What if there was a way to create more space for you to think clearly and react in a way you have rationally thought out? What if you could find ways to express your needs and reasonably consider the other person’s needs so that the conversation ends with a feeling of accomplishment, mutual agreement, even more closeness and connection instead?
There are ways. Their proven methods are available for free. They are old but still valid and seem to fit modern neuroscience. My goal is to write about them, mentioning the sources and let you know how a few friends and I apply them to become a better version of ourselves. Have you ever thought this: I wish I had known this earlier. It would have saved me from making a mistake. We are humans; we make mistakes; all of our life. And that is okay. Without mistakes, how would you lern?
Philosophy as a Way of Life
More than 2000 years before curious minds examined flaws in human thinking. Our passions (non-beneficial emotions in this context), our ways of framing, perceiving, interpreting situations in an unhealthy, irrational way. And 2000 years later, humans are still addressing the same problems in their everyday life.
There are ways to be more in control of our thoughts and conversations and therefore make viewer reasoning mistakes. I see improvement in my thinking and default reaction to irritable situations in life. All of them are interpersonal relationship situations. And in all of them, I am complicit if not entirely responsible.
I have shared my thoughts, my own work-in-progress with two of my friends. They came back to me individually, describing how life situations have improved for them and thanked me. They noticed similar changes. I felt a surge of gratitude.
I am not pretending to be exceptional and that you must listen to me because I know something you do not know. I am more like a fellow patient in this hospital called life. Maybe I am in that hospital a few days longer than you and can describe the treatment I received and how I feel better now. (I know I have this idea from a book, or a quote I read. I haven’t found the source yet.)That is all I am trying to do. And even after studying and practising, I make mistakes regularly. But I catch myself sooner doing them. It is progress that encourages us.
I connected my two friends, and until today we meet online every two weeks and discuss everyday life situations. We elaborate on Stoic principles of practical wisdom that causes improvements in our lives quality. We enlighten each other with different frames of the same circumstance. Learning together improves the learning experience. We feel a connection when we freely admit how we might have been complicit in a situation about something we say we do not want in our life. And it all improves us including the people around us.
What we do is what Philosophy used to be in its original meaning, before Philosophy broke apart into different subjects, before the Philosophers have been banned from Rome. Philosophy was a choice of life. A lifestyle that was governed by reason and awareness of our passions and biases to improve the whole human cosmopolis, the life of everyone in the universe.
In our conversations, like ancient Greco-Roman Philosophers, we dive deep into the workings of our minds and how our thinking shapes our perceptions. We discuss human biases, decision-making and fixed mindset thinking. And because we do so, we see alternative ways of dealing with complicated human interactions.
We are having conversations that create space for compassion, kindness, self-assessment, alternative perceptions and the freedom to choose. Without these conversations, only by reading a book, we lack practising our skills.
Besides conversations, writing is a way to create awareness about your thoughts. Marcus Aurelius is one of these writers. The most powerful man, the Emperor of Rome, was writing to himself to improve his character. Writing every day for only a few minutes in the morning to prepare your day and in the evening to assess your thinking, your interactions with others is a simple way to find patterns. I will write more about this in future articles.
- Do you write sometimes? What happens when you write? What are your thoughts?
- Was I able to describe some of my intentions for future articles?
